Maybe This Is the Article That Will Convince You Not to Cut Medicaid

In 2010, she went to the eye doctor for difficulties she was having with her vision. She thought she needed a new glasses prescription. Instead, she was admitted to the emergency room because the ophthalmologist thought she was having a stroke or a brain tumor.

Many appointments and tests and anxious weeks later, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the membrane around its own nerve fibers, causing scar tissue. A typical diagnosis requires two to three lesions on the brain; my sister’s brain had eleven. Because MS attacks the central nervous system, symptoms vary widely, ranging from fatigue and vision problems to seizures and paralysis. The worst part about MS is its unpredictability; one day my sister can seem healthy and the next day she can be overwhelmed with nerve pains, muscle spasms, and immobility.

At the time of her diagnosis, my sister was a 25-year-old stay-at-home mom to her 3-year-old daughter. Her husband’s insurance covered her then. But within a year of her diagnosis, they filed for divorce.

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This is not uncommon for women diagnosed with serious illnesses. A 2009 study published in the journal Cancer found that a married woman diagnosed with a serious disease is seven times more likely to be divorced or separated than a man with a similar diagnosis. Among study participants, the divorce rate was 21 percent for seriously ill women and 3 percent for seriously ill men.

After my sister’s diagnosis, her husband withdrew from the family. He engaged in addictive and destructive behaviors. That left my sister in a position where her access to health care was tied to a marriage that was not good for her or her daughter.

The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, made it possible for her to live as a single mom with a chronic illness.

It qualified her for Medicaid coverage in Montana. It ensured that she would not be discriminated against in the health care market because she had a pre-existing condition. And it let her choose which treatment plan would be right for her and her body.

For six years, she experimented with different medications, starting with the cheaper ones (which cost $1,000-$3,000 a month). Her symptoms did not improve: Sometimes she relapsed, sometimes she got sicker, and sometimes she had to take drugs to deal with symptoms caused by other drugs. Still, she felt it was worth it to try to slow the progression of the disease.

It would cost her $65,000 a year without insurance

Last year, she found a treatment that works: It’s called Rituxan and it would cost her $65,000 a year without insurance. It’s part of a chemotherapy treatment she does every few months. It leaves her feeling sick and unable to work for a few days, but it works.

Last spring, Maggie graduated from Montana State with a degree in social work. She recently got a part-time job at an assisted living facility, which is funded in part by Medicaid.

It’s a good fit for her, because full-time work would be incredibly difficult with both her MS and her current treatment plan. It’s also a good fit for her because Maggie is one of the most caring people I know. She works with some of the most marginalized people in our society—elderly individuals, people with mental illness, those with severe disabilities—all unable to work or care for themselves.

The Congressional Republican health care plan could change all of that.

Under their plan, my sister could lose Medicaid because her part-time, low-wage income would disqualify her.

Under their plan, my sister could lose coverage for Rituxan, the only treatment that has worked for her so far.

Under their plan, my sister’s pre-existing condition could be used as justification to raise costs on her medical insurance.

Under their plan, my sister’s mobility and opportunity would be more limited by her economic insecurity than they are by her MS.

This is what it means to be uninsured. It means you cannot live safely and comfortably in your own body.

Maybe, if one of them is sympathetic enough, we'll be taken seriously.

It is excruciating to have to determine the trade-offs your family can make to maintain your sister’s health care. It is even worse to make those choices, knowing they would become worse under all the new iterations of the conservatives’ health care plan. But the true hell is having to have to do it all in public: To have to write articles like this with personal testimonies, create heartbreaking GoFundMe campaigns, share that video of Jimmy Kimmel talking about his baby with tears in his eyes, in the hopes that they go viral. Maybe, if one of them is sympathetic enough, someone will look my sister in the eyes and decide her pain, and her life, should be taken seriously.

At the very least, today, I will be calling undecided senators in Congress so that they can understand the impact of their vote. But let it be known that it’s only one among hundreds of efforts my family, like so many others, undertake to get access to health care for the people we love.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: How We Cut Poverty in New York City

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito listen to Sam Morse, owner of Southside Design and Building, as they tour his shop at the Greenpoint Manufacturing & Design Center in the Greenpoint section of the borough of Brooklyn in New York, on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2015. (Todd Maisel/The Daily News via AP)

I came into office determined to use every tool available to a Mayor of New York to fight the inequality that is threatening the city I love. There’s still much more to do, but New Yorkers should be proud that we have taken big steps forward.

Our city is now measurably fairer. By the end of the first two years of our administration, the share of New Yorkers living in or near poverty fell almost two percent. We now have the lowest share of New Yorkers living at or near poverty since the Great Recession.

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This did not happen by accident. It was the result of choices we made every day. We chose working families over corporations. We chose seniors over developers. We chose neighborhoods over hedge fund billionaires. The income inequality that has been strangling us is the result of choices made by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent. We made choices for the 99 percent.

We made those choices on a massive scale. We added an entire grade to the country’s largest public school system: nearly 70,000 4-year-olds now receive free, all-day high-quality pre-K. That saves the average family $10,000 a year, and frees parents to pursue their careers and education.

We marched with workers and won a $15 minimum wage. We set a goal to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, the biggest program in a quarter century—and we’re ahead of schedule. We’ve seen the first rent freezes in city history, affecting 2.5 million New Yorkers. We are rewriting rules to make employment work for everyone, including guaranteeing paid sick leave and placing restrictions on potential employers inquiring about salary or criminal history.

These choices are producing results.

This is the result of choices we make every day.

Poverty is now at its lowest level since the Great Recession and a broad cross section of New Yorkers are reaping the benefits. Many groups saw significant declines in poverty or near poverty including: single parents; seniors; adults of working age; people with high school educations; blacks, Latinos, Asians and whites.

We are already five years ahead of schedule on our goal to lift 800,000 people out of poverty by 2025. We project that by the end of this year more than 280,000 men, women and children – about the population of Newark, New Jersey – will rise out of poverty or near-poverty.

Given the tired and phony arguments conservatives so often trot out to oppose policies like these, it’s important to state clearly that our decisions have helped our economy. Let me repeat that: We’ve helped working people and our economy is stronger than ever.

Employment is at a record high. Just 4.1 percent of New Yorkers were unemployed in April 2017. That means there are a quarter million more people in the workforce today than in 2013.

The jobs New Yorkers are finding are good jobs. The share of New Yorkers earning more than $50,000 a year grew to more than 48 percent in 2015. That is its highest level in a decade. Comparing 2015 to two years before, almost 125,000 more New Yorkers are earning more than $50,000 per year.

There are many reasons for Americans to be worried these days. We have a president and a Republican-controlled Congress that want to take us backwards. Their plans would give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations, let Wall Street write its own rules, and gut health care for millions to fund handouts for millionaires.

At the same time, I’m hopeful. Big, bold progressive policies are working right here in New York City and that matters now more than ever. People are watching us. They’re looking for an antidote. They’re looking for a different way forward and we are proving that an economy by, for, and of the people can be a strong and growing economy, too.

A Year After Pulse, We Are More Than Survivors

In this Monday, June 13, 2016, file photo, crowd members hold up candles during a vigil downtown for the victims of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

I still remember the metallic taste in my mouth when I first heard about the Pulse night club shooting. I was sitting on my couch, hung over from DC Pride, scrolling through Twitter. My whole feed was full of AP alerts tallying the body count, of articles describing the lives lost, of members of the Orlando LGBTQ community searching for their loved ones. Almost immediately after that initial wave of nausea hit me, the tears came.

And for about 24 hours, maybe more, they didn’t stop.

Many LGBTQ people know what it’s like to feel rejected. Too many know what it’s like to be attacked. But to feel terrorized was a sensation that many of us weren’t familiar with. A year later, we are still grappling with it.

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I remember reading through the last names of those who were killed and seriously injured that evening. Those last names looked just like mine, and like those of the people I love and consider my chosen family. These gorgeous Latinx people went to a club—which has always been our safe place—to celebrate their community, to dance and release their inhibitions, and to be understood. Their freedom to express who they were, their right to create space in a world that didn’t always celebrate them, was brutally stomped out. There is no reconciling that.

That morning, I called my mom, wrote a piece on Medium, and then went to church. I sat with a friend, in my usual pew at St. Augustine’s—center aisle, four rows from the back—and listened to the chorale sing about love, piety, and stewardship. After the second hymn, I felt the lump begin to form in my throat and I started to cry again. Seated in a beautiful house of worship, surrounded by stained glass and marble, I felt robbed of something sacred to me: my sense of safety. I know that many of my friends felt the same way I did, and some still do.

We gave each other what we needed

I dragged myself into the office the next day, knowing it would be painful. I didn’t get much work done that day—at least, not as it was written in my job description. Instead, I helped fill our biggest conference room with staff who needed to feel heard and safe. We shared stories about ourselves, about our families, about being survivors of other horrifying acts of gun violence, about solidarity. The raw emotion shown in that room was so powerful. We cried and held one another, and we were honest with our allies about our fears. We gave each other what we needed that day: reassurance and compassion.

In the year that has passed since the Pulse shooting, we have learned a lot about our country. We have learned that homophobic politicians will do whatever is best for them, including ignoring the identities of the people we lost that night. We have learned that the gun lobby will use any tragedy to encourage the proliferation of gun use. We have learned that it continues to be dangerous to exist in this world as Latinx and LGBTQ, let alone both. And we have learned that the pettiness of Donald Trump, who thanked people for congratulating him “for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” instead of mourning the 49 lives we lost, knows no bounds.

But the most important lesson we have learned is that the LGBTQ community is strong. We are resilient. We are beautiful. We are politically powerful. No mad man, or coalition of racists or homophobes, can take from us what we manifest in each other: unapologetic love.

The Washington Post’s Reporting on Disability Is Giving Trump Cover for Disability Cuts

The Washington Post is out with the second in a series of articles pushing the nastiest of myths about Social Security disability benefits and the people who rely on them.

Their latest article, titled “Generations, disabled,” doubles down on seriously flawed reporting that The Post began in March. This time the author, Terrence McCoy, profiles a family in Missouri struggling with poverty and health-related challenges. McCoy takes aim at many aspects of their lives, but the one he reserves the most scorn for—the fact that more than one person in the family receives disability benefits—mirrors the same disability cuts Trump called for in last week’s budget proposal.

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The piece immediately drew deserved criticism on social media from a range of respected journalists and experts including The Atlantic’s Annie Lowry, Vox’s Matt Yglesias and Dylan Matthews, and former National Economic Council Chairman Gene Sperling.

Would love it if this Post story showed any data demonstrating that the growth in SSDI is due to cultural factors. https://t.co/6JWwNIiYuH

Like the first article in The Post’s series, the latest story willfully ignores the reality of Social Security disability benefits, instead relying on flawed data and flowery writing and anecdotes to paint a cartoonish picture of rural America overtaken by a “culture of disability.” As my colleague Kate Gallagher Robbins pointed out on Twitter, the piece reads like a work of fiction. It even opens with a stage-setting mini-story practically ripped from Of Mice and Men, in which a child accidentally drops and nearly kills his new puppy.

Notably, where the piece does introduce evidence beyond richly woven anecdote, what evidence it includes contradicts The Post’s narrative.

Case in point: The article makes much of the fact that multiple family members, such as a parent and a child, might receive disability benefits. Yet the article’s text makes no mention of the data featured in a sidebar, which tell the real story here: that disability often runs in families. But The Post would rather blame the lifeboat for the flood.

This kind of reporting isn’t just stigmatizing and misleading—it’s dangerous.

You wouldn’t know it from The Post’s reporting, but as my colleagues and I have pointed out time and again—including in our multipleresponsestoThe Post’s previous go-round on disability—Social Security disability benefits are incredibly hard to get. The vast majority of applicants are denied, and fewer than 4 in 10 Social Security Disability Insurance applicants are approved, even after all stages of appeal. For those who do receive benefits, they are modest—barely enough to bring many disability beneficiaries far above the federal poverty line.

A set of personal testimonials tacked on as an addendum to the article tells the real story of disability benefits. These reader stories offer a more accurate description of what these benefits mean to people who rely on them to make ends meet—and the immense challenges that living with a disability or chronic illness can bring. Kudos to The Post for including them—but disappointingly, they appear to be an afterthought that failed to penetrate the paper’s reporting on these programs.

This kind of reporting isn’t just stigmatizing and misleading—it’s dangerous. A flurry of anecdote-based media accounts in the late 1980s and early 1990s—which created the original “welfare queen” myth—paved the way for politicians to dismantle cash assistance for poor families with children in the name of “welfare reform.” In the 25 years since, the share of poor families with kids helped by the shell of a program that remains—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—has dropped from 8 in 10 to fewer than 1 in 4.

The current political climate, paired with The Washington Post’s reporting, is setting disability benefits to meet the same fate as cash assistance. Just last week, President Trump proposed a whopping $72 billion in cuts to these disability programs in his budget. Before this series, I would have expected better from The Post than to give cover to such cruel and heartless cuts.

My Health Care Race with Congressional Republicans

Since the new administration took office, I have been living in a constant state of stress. My family and I get our health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, also known as Health First in Colorado, and President Trump and Congressional Republicans campaigned on repealing the law. Nearly every day, there is a new update on health care legislation. And every day, my concern remains unchanged: Will my children and I be covered?

The possibility that I could lose my insurance looms over me like a death sentence. My son was born with a very rare genetic diagnosis, which comes with a half dozen specialists. He’ll need those doctors until he is at least 18 years old, and there is no way that I can pay for all of them myself (I’d have to earn over $100,000 a year). Then, last December, my daughter got sick, and I was diagnosed with an injury that required possible surgery—plus specialists, appointments and medication.

Now I am racing to schedule as many appointments as I can, while I still have that option.

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In January and February, my kids and I had 20 appointments between the three of us. That takes time, energy, and money. It impacts my children’s education—it decides when they attend school, and when they miss it. It also impacts when and how much I work, since I’m spending hours driving to appointments, talking with providers on the phone, and communicating with Medicaid about what is covered and what is not. At any given time, I may need to take my son to an appointment. And to deal with my injury, I have had to spend a lot of time resting. This translates to an odd work schedule that touches 6-7 days per week, somewhere between the hours of 6:30 AM – 11:00 PM.

My family isn’t the only one like this.

My family isn’t the only one like this. At least 23 million people would lose their health care if the House health care bill becomes law. I know those people. I have close friends with children on the autism spectrum. I have a sibling with Down syndrome who nearly died last year. I have two parents whose health care needs increase every year—including a father who has battled cancer four times in the past four years. We are not just a number that can be reviewed or dismissed.

And then there’s the issue of pre-existing condition exclusions that will drive up the prices for the care we do have. If my son is no longer able to see his specialists, it will severely impact his life. If he doesn’t receive the surgery he needs in a few years, it will affect his entire body.

As legislators debate the fate of healthcare for Americans, there are millions of families like mine—with mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who deserve basic, daily, necessary care—from vitamins and supplements to cancer treatments. No child deserves to live while another dies, just because their family has more money to afford treatment.

I beseech the legislators to consider what they would do for their families if they were suddenly faced to choose healthcare for their loved ones, or none at all. May wisdom—not profit—prevail.